29 Feb 08 One metric to rule them all?

The Page view is all but dead as a metric for measuring the success of a website. Despite many companies pushing to get them higher and higher to satisfy the demands of advertising agencies - as explained in this article from RRW , it seems that even engagement as a metric has it’s short comings . Even Microsoft have weighed in with “engagement mapping” .

What is clear here is that Page Views are almost meaningless except as an indicator for server loads, and engagement is a fluffy term that lacks a clear relation to a company’s goals. It would seem that the one metric to rule them all approach might be a pipe dream for people that would love to be able to apply apples to apples comparisons of things that are clearly apples and oranges. True, the core metric to measure those by should be nutritional value, but well all know that colour, weight, smell and taste contribute to our apples and oranges decisions.

Is there a nutritional value of a website to the users that rely on it?

Ultimately, it may lie purely in the ROI, the return on investment. For Google, there are two major stake holders - the searchers and the marketers. For searchers, they invest their time (very little) and are returned very well targeted information. Here you need a metric for the information quality (like a quality score) and possibly a monetary valuation of time (as we all know T=$).

For the marketer, they invest Time and Money, and they are returned Impressions and Clicks. The market then tries to map these to visits, and then this to conversions, then to a ROI (actually ignoring the time component).

For each website, the way the stakeholders map their ROI will always be different, and measurements of Page Views, Time Spent on site etc have always been proxies for determining what this one core metric for capitalist nutritional value is. Time spent per visit is great for Facebook, less so for Google. Number of visits is great for Google, less so for YouTube (see Why visitors is a misleading metric).

ROI comes with conversion, finding the correct proxies for this are going to be different in different media. Things like user reviews and ratings will be helpful indicators as we close in on the ultimate conversion goal. For now we must find the metrics that are the best proxies for narrowing in on this goal, and this is going to have to vary - but the bottom line of this IS the bottom line.